Given the times, the bankruptcy filing of a major communications company might perversely go all but unnoticed. Still, it’s worth our while to take a closer look at this one. Many of the reports this morning about the Tribune Company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy have highlighted the precarious position of newspaper companies in an era of declining subscriptions and advertising revenue. But on the operations side, the Tribune Co. is actually very healthy: every one of the newspapers and television stations (including Seattle-area stations KCPQ and KMYQ) in its portfolio is profitable. The only reason Tribune had to file for bankruptcy is that Sam Zell, the real-estate billionaire who bought the company last year and serves as its CEO, saddled the company with $8 billion in debt as part of a heavily leveraged buyout in which Zell only put up 3 percent of the purchase price.

The analogy with the bursting of the housing bubble is hard to ignore: both are symptomatic of a financial culture that largely did away with traditional notions of risk in favor of a large-scale game of musical chairs in which all the players gambled that they’d be able to find a seat when the music stopped. Unfortunately, with every day that goes by there seems to be fewer and fewer seats to go around.